Schools Not Children, Are Stupid

As I’ve said earlier, knowing and its institutionalization is what organizes far too much of our lives. And the institution that takes the prize for institutionalizing knowing is education. Our obsession with knowing underlies nearly everything that’s wrong with schools. In this chapter I’ll take you on a journey through the halls of stupidity.

The ABCs

Let’s start with the basics. I call them the ABCs of the ABCs.

A is for authoritarianism and acquisition and age groups and ability level.

B is for boundaries and behavior and boredom.

C is for control and cognition and cheating.

A is for Authoritarianism.

I’m sure there are some schools at which students have a say in how things run. But for 99% of children and adolescents, and even adults in colleges and universities, it’s, “Here’s how we do things. This is what’s expected of you.” Whether we’re told, “We will do reading from 8:45 to 9:30 and math from 9:30-10:15,” “You will open your books to page 38,” “You will sit in your seat,” or “You must take Intro to Philosophy before you can take Aesthetics or Philosophy of Science,” the rules and regulations of where to go and what to do once you’re there come from above. How far above varies a lot. It could be coming from the federal government, a state or municipal regulatory body, a local district, a principal or dean, a department, a teacher or professor. But someone other than you and all the other learners are making the rules—about what you will learn, who you will learn with, when you will learn it, and what the proper conditions and ways of learning are that are “right” for you and the other learners. These rules need to be obeyed without question or resistance.

That’s authoritarian.

A is for Acquisition.

Unless you work in an industry that buys and sells companies or art or rare manuscripts, chances are the word “acquisition” doesn’t come up everyday. We say, “I bought a new iPhone” or “My mom got me a new pair of sneakers” to share with our friends that this new thing is now in our possession. It’s rather revealing, isn’t it, that educators and psychologists also “talk acquisitions.” That’s officially what learning is—the acquiring of knowledge and skills. It’s the definition (check for yourself), it’s the dominant understanding, and it’s the practice of schools. Learning as acquisition reduces many years of complex, relational and intertwined life activities into a mere possession or two or ten (or fifty). What I mean is this: when we’re learning, what we’re doing is becoming engaged in more and more of the forms of life of our particular culture and the world culture. We’re developing some level of facility in using many of the existing cultural tools. We’re also creating some level of confidence that we can, and some amount of curiosity about what works and doesn’t work. That’s very different (and far more creative and interesting) from “getting it” or acing the test.

Schools are acquisitional.

A is for Age Groups and Ability Levels.

With the exception of the few remaining one-room schoolhouses and alternatives schools scattered around the world, a sure sign that you’re in a school is all the separate groups there are, and what the people in them look like. 4 year-olds are grouped with 4-year olds, 10 year olds with 10-year-olds, and 16 year-olds with 16 year-olds. Once that’s done, all the 4 year-olds, all the10 year-olds and all the 16 year-olds are grouped again into smaller groups, this time by something called ability level. We wind up with classes of top, middle and low 4 year-olds, 10 year-olds, 16 year-olds, and so on. We’re not done yet, though. Many tracked classrooms (low, middle, top or whatever names they’re given in a particular school) often are divided still further by an even narrower “measure of ability” for parts of the day (for example, reading or math). Imagine if infants and babies were isolated into age and ability groups—they’d never learn if they only spent their time with other babies. Their worlds get bigger day by day because they learn from people different from them. But past babyhood, school makes our worlds smaller as we’re forced to spend the school day being with people “like us.”

Age and ability groups make it hard to learn in school.

B is for Boundaries.

Organizing what is to be learned into separate and distinct “subjects” goes hand in glove with organizing learners into separate and distinct groupings based on what are presumed to be homogeneous ability levels. School subjects are a chopping up of human culture. They’re ways of understanding and acting on the world that human beings created over centuries—ripped apart from that human history and from each other, turned into “stand alone” bodies of knowledge. A tragedy, because you can learn to read, add, subtract, multiply and divide from cereal boxes and yogurt containers and potato chip bags in the kitchen (and such reading and math play is common with many toddlers). Text is everywhere. Sound is everywhere. Math is everywhere. Science is everywhere. History is everywhere. They’re everywhere and they’re all jumbled together in what we call living. But it’s a rare school kid who knows that. By attending school, kids come to understand math (and reading, science, history and so on) like this: “Math is Ms. So-and-so’s class.” “Math is first period.” “Math is this homework.” By dividing all of human culture into distinct subjects, schools—in the name of knowledge acquisition—actually alienate us from knowledge and keep us ignorant.

Boundaries distort the world and the learning process.

B is for Behavior.

How schools work and the ideas about learning and development they’re based on come from psychology. And since the biggest idea in psychology is behavior, schools follow suit and see and evaluate human beings in terms of how they behave. There’s an interesting history to how behavior became the subject matter of psychology (see Note 1) to the point where everything is seen as one kind of behavior or another (acting-out behavior, addictive behavior, anti-social behavior, communicative behavior, conscious and unconscious behavior, and on and on). The American Psychological Association’s Glossary of Psychological Terms defines behavior as “the actions by which an organism adjusts to its environment.” Wow! Never mind being reduced to an organism, it’s the conservatism of that statement that is so disturbing. Human beings don’t merely adjust to environments. We create them! And we can and do re-create them, reshape them, transform them. But if we ignore that, then we wind up with adjustment being the basis for how we relate—and that, of course, includes consequences for not adjusting—ergo, “behavioral problems.”

Schools stifle development in the name of behavior.

B is for Boredom.

By far, the most common word middle and high school students use in connection to school is, “Boring.” (There are actually surveys that show this.) Boredom is thought to be a leading factor in school drop out, depression and what school administrators love to call acting out behavior. In the media, school boredom is “an epidemic” (New Republic), “the elephant in the (class) room” (US News and World Report), and “crushing” (Boston Globe), with schools described as “penitentiaries of boredom” (Huffington Post) and our educational system as “the boring institute” (“Boredom: The Movie”). To the extent that anyone has ideas about what produces boredom, it has to do with doing things over which you have no control again and again. Since that’s what schools are designed to do, isn’t boredom a lawful by-product? Maybe that’s how come what kids, journalists and experts say has no impact. In our culture, work is boring and play is engaging. Take play out of school and it becomes work.

School is boring.

C is for Control.

Control is the manifestation of authoritarianism and the arbiter of behavior. Students are under the control of teachers who direct what they do and when and how they do it. The teachers, in turn, are under the control of higher ups who tell them what to do and when and how to do it so that they can direct their students’ behavior in accordance with the pre-arranged authoritarian rules, regulations and norms. Apparently, all this control from above isn’t enough. By the time they enter school, students are supposed to have “self-control” (that is, to “regulate” their own behavior)—to delay gratification, suppress certain impulses, think about consequences, and act with intention. If they don’t, and if they disrupt the regulated order of the classroom, they’re said to “misbehave,” be “out of control,” or have a “behavior problem” or “self-regulation deficits” (or all of the above).

Schools are control centers.

C is for Cognition.

If schools weren’t obsessed with knowing and organized for cognitive learning (the acquisition of knowledge), no one would have ever thought to invent a Social Emotional Learning (SEL) curriculum and sell it to school districts. [See note 2] If learning were taken to be a social-cognitive-emotive unity, as Vygotsky believed, then “the social” and “the emotional” wouldn’t be relegated to a kind of learning; they would be what learning is. But decades of relating to emotions as having no place in learning and to students as individualistic cognitive processing machines have taken their toll. Apparently, too many children lack the “soft skills.” That means people skills if you didn’t know—a phrase so cognitively biased I’m embarrassed for whoever coined it. SEL is supposed to teach kids to be empathetic, to care about others, to form positive relationships and to be ethical. And it’s all being done in the name of … you guessed it—their academic (read: cognitive) success.

Schools are organized for cognition, not for caring.

C is for Cheating.

If students talk to each other, share their work and understanding, and learn together, they’re called cheaters. Yes, there’s group work, but for most students most of the time, “No talking,” and “Do your own work” is the rule. How strange compared to the ways we do things before school and outside of school. People are always helping young children by doing things with them. Children and adults help each other remember things (“A pig has… a curly tail;” “Toes? Yes, Mommy has 10 toes and you have 10 toes;” “What’s the name of that restaurant? It starts with an A…;” “How long do we usually cook the turkey?”). They teach each other how to do things by doing them together, even so-called cognitive tasks such as problem solving, measuring, sorting, mixing and remembering. Arguably, we learn developmentally by copying. Distorting learning into the acquisition of knowledge by isolated individuals, who now possess it, makes collaboration and creative imitation into a “bad behavior” at best, and sometimes even a crime. It also makes rote copying when it’s prohibited (plagiarism) seductive in order to get something schools value—a good grade.

Schools are organized to make “cheating” attractive—and then punish the cheaters.

Knowing and Expertise are Not the Same Thing

I’ve come to the end of the ABCs of the ABCs—with the sad realization of how easy it is to keep going until we get all the way to Z—“Z is for zombifying.” (See Note 3 for the great ABCs readers sent me.) There’s a reason I call schools stupid, and not misguided, or flawed, or even corrupted. Doing stupid is doing things against what’s right in front of you, against what your experience and intelligence tell you won’t work, playing deaf to the cries for help of those you’re with. Doing stupid is being a knower (even when you don’t know). And the people who set up schools, their structure, teaching methods, curricula, professional development and evaluations are professionalknowers. They’ve studied for years and years and earned graduate degrees in some or all of the following: learning, teaching, child development, adult development, organizational development, and leadership. They should be expert in these fields. But they aren’t. They should perform intelligently and with common sense and creativity. But they don’t. Given their profession, they should, be fantastic learners. But they’re not. Their knowing, and their equating expertise with what they know, keeps them from being good learners.

What they are, for the most part, are good and well-meaning people. Yes, they are trapped in an authoritarian educational bureaucracy beholden to corporate and political interests. (See note 4 if you’re interested in books that analyze and/or criticize the economic and political nature of education and education reform.) But they’re also trapped by a culture that insists that we (especially the professional knowers among us) must know what we’re doing or we wouldn’t be doing it.

Real expertise, by which I mean the activity of continuously challenging ourselves to question and discover, to seek out and listen to and learn from what others see and think and feel, is a kind of play. In Vygotsky’s sense, it’s a “head taller” activity of letting experience and imagination mutually influence each other to create something new. In Wittgeenstein’s simple words, it requires us to “look and see.” It includes the common sense that comes from careful, authentic looking at what’s in front of you. It includes sifting through research findings and policy changes and spotting the assumptions behind them. It includes being open to being inspired. It includes being keen observers of what’s working and not working in your own school and community. And it includes finding the kind of support that can organize the school community to make changes.

People with this kind of expertise wouldn’t create schools that kill creativity, have no joy, are simultaneously stressful and boring, eliminate play and playfulness, manufacture behavioral problems and mental disorders, keep children and teens physically inactive, turn teachers into lab assistants and data inputters, blame families for what is no one’s fault, insist on uniformity while fostering competition, discourage responsibility for others, and … feel free to add to this list.)

Smart schools do exist. (See Note 5 for some recommendations of where to learn about them.) I am well aware of wonderful schools and phenomenal teachers and administrators. But I’ve been in enough schools, colleges and universities, spoken to enough teachers and students and parents and counselors, conducted enough educational research, and read enough first-hand accounts and analyses to write what I believe is the norm of how things are.

It’s knowing that underlies schools’ stupidities and their persistence in the face of failure after failure. Why are budget cuts made the way they are? (Why there are budget cuts to education at all is another questions.) It’s the dualisms and dichotomies and causal-linear understandings that are the what and how of knowing that keep schools dumb. What could justify making children and teens sit still, eliminating recess and otherwise constraining movement and physical exercise for six hours a day? Mind-body dualism is a good candidate. What could justify decades of ignoring “good” feelings and punishing and/or medicalizing “bad” ones (and then bringing in a social-emotional learning curriculum)? The cognition-emotion split is a good candidate. What could justify sorting students into age groups and ability levels, and the boundaries between school subjects and the lock-step progression within subjects? A causal-linear model of understanding the world (including the very way people come to understand it) is a good candidate.

At the broadest level, schools put the work-play and product-process dichotomies “to work” with a vengeance. Schools are places for the work of acquisitional learningand its products, not the play of developmental learning, in which the process is inseparable from the product. What’s important about work is what it produces—the outcome, the products. What’s important about play (to those who do it) is the playing—the process-and-product. We’re as aware of and involved in the process of our playing as we are of the products of our play. With play split apart from work, and process split apart from product, the work of school—which is to acquire and show proof of product, has no place for the producers (the learners) to create the process, to play. These dichotomies are the root of the authoritarianism structure and control, the elimination of play and playfulness, and the pervasive boredom of school.

Why School?

As I’m writing this, I switch to my Facebook feed and see that a few “friends” have posted articles about parents in some American cities organizing themselves to protest their schools’ testing. Others point to articles reporting on parent protests in Florida and Oregon demanding that recess be put back in the school day. Switching screens again to my inbox, there’s a message from TED.com recommending popular talks (like the wonderful ones by Sir Ken Robinson and Sugatra Mitra) and the TEDebook by Will Richardson entitled, Why School? How Education Must Change when Learning and Information are Everywhere. Coincidently, there’s another message the same day from Amazon notifying me that my order of Why School? Reclaiming Education for All of Us by Mike Rose has been shipped. A day later I get a message that there’s a new column by Peter Gray on his Psychology Today blog, “Freedom to Learn.” (Check out Peter’s TEDxNavesink talk, “The Decline of Play” (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Bg-GEzM7iTk) as well as mine, “Play Helps Us Grow at Any Age” (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E4sdVE0Q9Lk).

News of this kind is heartening. Much of it is in sync with the ideas that our brains need not be overweight with facts and information and that play is essential to developing as learners. The more voices, the better.

Have you heard of Salman Khan and the Khan Academy? He was a hedge fund analyst with an engineering and business background who recognized the anachronism of classrooms in the age of the Internet. His Kahn Academy is a platform (in five languages) with free videos, exercises and instructional manuals for individual and classroom use. According to its website, about 400 million learners complete exercises each day. Kahn believes passionately that knowledge acquisition is crucial for the continuation of civilization and that technology can offer a world-class education for every person on the planet free of all cost. That’s what he’s trying to do. I think it’s fabulous. Kahn’s not about to give up knowing, but he apparently grasps the necessity of lots of “non-knowing growing” time, as summed up in this excerpt from his book, The One World School House:

Students need a firm foundation before anything of consequence can be accomplished. But the simple truth is that building up this foundation doesn’t need to eat up half their lives…fundamental coursework can be handled in one or two hours a day. That frees up five or six hours for creative pursuits, both individual and collaborative. That might mean writing poems or computer code, making films or building robots, working with paint or in some weird little corner of physics or math—it being remembered that original math or science or engineering is neither more nor less than art by another name. (Khan, 2012, pp. 248-9)

Can you imagine that?

Notes to Help You Go Deeper and Broader

Kurt Danziger is a wonderful scholar who writes about the history of psychology. I highly recommend two of his books: Constructing the Subject and Naming the Mind. In the latter, there’s an entire chapter devoted to how behavior became the category that psychology used to define its subject matter. In Danziger’s words , “Classifying diverse phenomena together as instances of “behaviour” was the first necessary step in establishing the claim that Psychology was one science with one set of explanatory principles” (Naming the Mind, p. 86). In our book Unscientific Psychology, Fred Newman and I build on Danziger’s historical analysis and add some of our own understandings of how behavior is so troublesome.

Hundreds of books have been written critiquing schools as institutions of control that are designed to fail large portions of the population and keep the elite in positions of authority. The ones that influenced me the most are those that anyone unhappy with education in the late 20th century read. I don’t know if they’re read very much anymore but they should be. They include: Ivan Illich’s Deschooling Society; Jonathan Kozol’s Death at an Early Age; Paolo Friere’s Pedagogy of the Oppressed; John Holt’s How Children Fail and How Children Learn (his newsletter, which ran from 1977-2001, was called Growing without Schooling; issues are archived at http://issuu.com/patfarenga/stacks/bb179dac91264c10bb183f89bf955935). Among the many, many critics of today, those widely read and studied academically include Peter McLaren (Rage and Hope: Interviews with Peter McLaren on War, Imperialism, and Critical Pedagogy), Lisa Delpit (Other People’s Children: Cultural Conflict in the Classroom), and Henry Giroux (Disposable Youth: Racialized Memories, and the Culture of Cruelty and Border Crossings: Cultural Workers and the Politics of Education).

I wrote a book, School for Growth, in which I described three schools that fit my criteria for being smart. One of them, the Sudbury Valley School (http://www.sudval.org) has been running since 1968, published a series of books over the decades, and has had about three dozen schools in the US and other countries modeled after it. It’s hard to track schools that focus on developing students as learners rather than knowers, so I urge you to do some Google and Amazon searches. And to check out the videos, website and print materials of the people I mention in the Why School? section of this chapter.

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12 Comments

loisholzmanApril 27, 2015 at 10:47 pm

Andrew, your lived experience of what I wrote is so important! I might want to include it in the final book (with your permission, of course).

This book is so different from what I read before. I won’t say that I have read enough book, but the books I have read before were just so straight and narrow. They are not bad, they are just so normal. I like this book, it is so fresh, provoking, creative and interesting. Even though I did not agree all of them.
I like your detailed descriptions of the ABCs, I agree with most of them. I agree with the one “A is for age groups and ability levels”. Why students should learn together with same-age peers? Why could not we let students in different ages and abilities in the same class? I always had this idea that it might be beneficial for young children if they could study with different kinds of peers, peers in different ages, peers who have different interests, peers who are good at different subjects? In the past, girls and boys went to schools separately. Nowadays, gender is no longer a limitation for schooling, why age?
But I am not quite agree with the idea “C is for control”. Schools need control. Teachers and administrators need control. It is very necessary for teachers to control the students. By control, I did not mean students had to do exactly what teacher asked. But students do need to obey teachers and adults for the most of the time. I am saying this because I am a Asian. I grow up in China and spent my would schooling days there, from first grade till I graduated from college. And now I came to US to pursue my graduate study, I had this deeper understanding and feeling of the big difference between Western and Eastern educational theory. In most Asian countries, school and teachers are authorities, we students must obey the rules and instructions at school. I was not a big fan of this kind of teaching approach. Yet I had o admit that it is an very effective way of classroom management and teaching. And it is also an efficient way for students learning. So my point of view is, it sounds awful that teachers and schools “control” students in some way. But this kind of control should not be abolished at all. We still the “control” for some level.

Aycan ErenApril 9, 2015 at 10:36 pm

As I delve deeper into research surrounding human development and it’s relation to the education system, I find that the topic of play is one that is reoccurring. For example, in her article, “The Development Line”, Lenora Fulani also makes mention to Vygotsky’s work on play. She states, “This meant to us that the treatment of children as simply who they are, without recognition that they are themselves ‘process’ (who they are and who they are becoming), imposes a limitation on human growth” (Fulani, 2013). That being said, with widening realization (or rather remembrance) of the importance of play in human development, I think that this book and its criticisms of the current schooling system is extremely relevant and eye-opening. Play is deterred and discouraged in schools in more ways than one. It isn’t simply in that recess is shortened or removed completely from the school day; it is in all of the ways mentioned in this chapter.
I distinctly remember as a child, the variety of play that I engaged in. Benefits came from not only play that I engaged in with my brother, friends or family, but from play that I engaged in alone as well. This book and it’s heavy reinforcement on the importance of play at all ages, prompted me to share this information with my father and simultaneously thank him for pretending to be my student as I “played” teacher and for pretending to be an awe-filled audience as I put on a performance as a television actress in an imaginary sitcom. As a child I remember pretending to be an actress, a teacher, a hair stylist, a veterinarian that performed surgeries on all of her sickly stuffed animals, etc. Throughout my maturation, I have mentally jumped from one of these occupations to another as goals for my future. Sure enough, I am currently working on a Master’s in Education in the hopes of becoming a teacher. I hadn’t thought too much about the play that may have led me down this career choice path, but now that I have, I realize that there is certainly a link.
Something else that I appreciate about this book is the mention of how the flaws embedded in the structure of our education system impacts or fails to impact the world and the problems that persist in it. Ultimately, that is certainly the bigger picture- what kind of growth/development are we fostering for future citizens of a world that has THIS many problems to fix? The desire to be well-versed in several areas of knowledge is one that has frequented my mind. If given the opportunity, I would love to become an expert on every bit of the human experience – in topics such as art history, religious studies, politics, economics, psychology etc. As mentioned in the introduction of this book, humanity and the human experience ARE indeed the unification of all of these subject areas and more. The push to pick a major (or one content area of mastery) coupled with the price tag put on higher education makes it impossible to be well versed in multiple subjects. I’ve considered that the existence of this problem mirrors a systemic hindrance of society- or as mentioned in this book- a way to keep us ignorant.

Andrew LelandApril 6, 2015 at 8:28 pm

What immediately strikes me with this work is the way that you point to several components of education and schooling as being normative and just assumed to be the case. These were highlighted more so in Chapter 5 with her version of the ABCs of the ABCs, so I’ll begin my discussion with that section. The focus with this section is to address structures of schooling that actually limit its intended purpose–learning and knowing. I found the first A, authoritarianism, to be the most thought provoking, as it reminded me of my teaching days in Philly schools, and also as my experience as a student. I’ll never forget the words of my 8th grade civics teacher (ironically)–that his classroom was not a democratic one, but that he was in charge. This type of authoritarianism exists both as explicitly as my experience and more implicitly, as you point out, in detailed classroom schedules and rules. A teacher in Philly, I felt like communicating these schedules and rules to students almost made up about 50% of their instruction time. Another more implicit version of authoritarianism exists in the fact that students are given very little agency in what and the ways they will learn. In other words, the content and pedagogy driving instruction are decided for students, giving them few (if any) options from which to choose.

Another ABC component that I found interesting was Cognition, and what you argue: “Schools are organized for cognition, not caring.” I can see the validity in this point, especially from my recent experiences in education research. Who in education research gets the majority of funding? Learning sciences. What this translates to me is that understanding how individuals come to learn overshadows other essential and important parts of schooling and education. Clearly, you are interested in play, but I think the assertion here also speaks on behalf of policies, practices, and research that takes other aspects of education into consideration. In differentiating between the process and product of schools (as they generally are) versus play, you makes one of her most convincing statements: “Schools are places for the work of acquisitional learning and its products, not the play of developmental learning, in which the process is inseparable from the product. […] What’s important about play (to those who do it) is the playing–the process-and-product.”

One of the central tenets of your book is outlined in the introduction that challenges the reason for the separation of play and school, especially in more recent developments in education. You laments over the simple fact that schools have become stripped of opportunities for recess, physical education, or a general chance to be creative. Instead, what has become the foreground of education is learning and acquiring facts and knowledge. Basically, schools are limiting the extent to which they allow their students to develop through the creative and important process of play.

I would also add to this argument that there are limited opportunities for teachers to foster such creativity in their classroom–at least this was the case for me. As a former music teacher, one would imagine that I had more flexibility in allowing my students to be creative. That is certainly true, but not to the extent at which I wanted my students to really explore their creativity. I think a lot of this has to do with some of the ABC issues raised in chapter 5–especially the authoritarianism, behavior, and control perspectives. Adopting strict schedules and rules were the maker (and responsibility) of a good teacher where I came from. That is, the teacher who had what appeared to be the best behaved group of students (2 straight, quiet lines in a hallway) was the teacher who was perceived to be most effective (?!?!). I certainly paid attention to some of these teacher expectations, as it was almost necessary in order for me to keep my job. Because of such strict rules/schedules/control, I could not provide opportunities for my students to really dig deep into their musical creativity. One example is that I wanted my students to learn about plays by actually engaging in theatre on the stage. These requests were always met with resistance from administration who feared that having students learn in an auditorium might result in all chaos and no learning.

loisholzmanApril 6, 2015 at 7:58 pm

Thank you so much, Diane, for speaking to what I was saying—from you hands-on experience as a teacher. I greatly appreciate it!
(And I wonder how some of the parents of the children in your class would respond to reading the book…)

Diane SzaboApril 6, 2015 at 6:09 pm

The first few chapters of this book really resonated with me. The importance of play was noted in the introduction and I couldn’t agree more. As a preschool educator, I have known that young children develop and learn through play. Play is slowly becoming removed from the elementary school–recess and physical education are cut, there’s no longer any more time for free play in school, and children are booked with after school activities. This is happening even in kindergarten! Everyone seems to be concerned with standards, curriculum, and assessments. I work in a upper-middle class school and this is definitely the culture. Parents are concerned about their children’s grades very early on. What is most concerning to me is that this is trickling down to preschool. Parents want their children reading in preschool so they won’t be behind in kindergarten! My preschoolers talk about their after school activities and I sometimes wonder if they are able to just go outside and play. (like I did when I was little) I feel like I am at a crossroads with what I know to be true about play (and what was stated in this book) and what parents and administrators expect out of the littlest learners in my school.

The second point that struck me was in chapter five under “knowing and expertise are not the same thing.” Administrators are smart people who have taught, gone on for further education, hold higher degrees, and have experience. It’s frustrating when they seem to make decisions that are not in the best interest of children and learning. This section again highlighted the importance of play and the process of learning verses the product. “With play split apart from work, and process split apart from product, the work of school–which is to acquire and show proof of product, has no place for the producers (the learners) to create the process, to play.” This aligned perfectly with what Ken Robinson spoke about in his TED talk, “Do Schools Kill Creativity?” He noted that instead of capitalizing on creativity, we have created a system where children are afraid to be wrong and make mistakes (because the end product is valued so much) and as a result we have educated them out of their creative capacities.

Danielle BarkeyApril 6, 2015 at 2:47 pm

I have never heard of the Overweight Brain before however found in very thought provoking. Comparing my personal experiences to the ones described in Chapter five, I can identify with some of them. A few things really stuck out to me. First of all, school is definitely boring for many students. Teachers fail to differentiate instruction, tap into student interest, and motivation and success rate suffers. I was surprised to read that boredom is the leading factor in school drop out. Second thing that stuck out to me was the control that schools exert. We all like to think that students have a say on how things go, however if you look up the chain of command, you realize how little control even teachers have in schools let alone the students. Looking closer at the experts (the top of the chain of command), the section knowing and expertise are not the same thing shows how this control affects the the school climate and environment. She says, “People with this kind of expertise wouldn’t create schools that kill creativity, have no joy, are simultaneously stressful and boring, eliminate play and playfulness, manufacture behavioral problems and mental disorders, keep children and teens physically inactive, turn teachers into lab assistants and data inputters, blame families for what is no one’s fault, insist on uniformity while fostering competition, discourage responsibility for others, and …” and teachers like to exert. Administrators are intelligent individuals, whom many look up to, however not everyone has the children as their priority. Schools now focus so much on perfection, the product, and push learning to the side. School is not become a place that fosters exploration and mistakes, rather a place to get perfect scores and have no fun. I could not agree more with what Amy said- Once we view learning and teaching from a standpoint, that we are involved in a process – both the students and teachers – then we can truly see how we can change the current situation in schools.

Michael MitchellMarch 8, 2015 at 5:25 pm

I appreciate the philosophical candor you have provided in this chapter. As I compare my education with your descriptions and premises, I certainly can identify, in some ways, with them. I am an older student and grew up in the climate of a 1958-70 education. Before the age and intellectual segregation and in the age of authoritarian classrooms/schools I had teachers I loved and those I hated. Overall, I hated school until I entered college. Not that I hated learning for I read voraciously (encyclopedias and comics) and sat quietly in school. My point? Schools are a sub-culture. In my age the were closely attached, educationally and behaviorally, to the family culture. Parents and communities had more involvement in policies and curriculum. This attachment slowly morphed as educational activists were able to enact philosophical/political forays into the vacuum created by a weakening family structure.

My goal is not to whine about the past but to recognize your accuracy in describing these educational problems. What happens next now that your philosophical activism (including your peers and those on whose shoulders you stand) is available for perusal? Your’s seems to be an academic “grassroots” movement meant to stimulate creative thinking and yourself embed a means of philosophical/educational shift in our culture. I applaud these efforts and find many points of agreement to questions/thoughts I have had in my career of “behavioral health.” I have and continued to wonder, from where is the “parsimony” of potential behavioral shift to emerge?

JWMarch 8, 2015 at 4:40 am

What you describe here is such a tragedy for humankind — it’s such a stultification of us all — terribly sad and such a waste.

We’re expert dichotomizers by the time we’re in 2nd grade. And by 3rd grade we’ve got the causal-linear model of understanding down pat. We become cowered as learners, players and explorers. Submissive to knowing.

I’m understanding the “end of knowing” as a profound liberatory activity.

Isn’nt it amazing how behavioral categories are created that are so good at blaming students. Why isn’t there a teaching disorder? Or Tearcher or school administrator emphathy disorder? Not that I’m advocating new categories for diasgnosis, rather, how biased and convinient behavioral catagories are for educational institutions.

Andrew TysonMarch 7, 2015 at 5:33 am

Hello Lois

Sadly, reading what you have written above is in-line with what I have experienced in Australia. This has been particularly in the field of psychology, where it is necessary to ‘know’ the correct diagnose and pathological catergory to label someone with, rather than how to simply be a human being with another human being. However, it is also not a new phenomena; as a reading of history in general will demonstrate education as merely being one of the current forms of the powerful to maintain power over those with less power. If I recall correctly, I think it was Freud whom promoted education as the means of making a fit and proper person to be a member of a society. I suspect Freud considered all social and educational structures are there to indoctrinate and form us, even our mental health professionals, into what is currently deemed to be the ‘fit and proper’ societal member. Such societal members are not required to be ‘creative’, or ‘different’, or to ‘think for themselves’; as this would cause disruptions for those whom are in power and set the standards, even as they are the product of ‘the standards’.

I get the impression that the most dominant understanding of what it is to be both human, and a ‘contributing member’ of our western society is now an economic model that revolves around consumption – including of knowledge (like your ‘acquisition’ idea), just look at the desciption of education as an ‘industry’ – and productivity. To question such assumptions is to threaten those whom govern – legislate social policy, and thus is discouraged. The discouragement often seems to come in the form of personal attacks, rather than persuasive arguments; as in ‘such thinking is un-Australian’; or not patriotic; even, the people voted the government in, so it must be the will of the people to be defined as economic units – an appeal to the ‘popular’ or the masses.

The question arises, as it has throughout human history – what is to be done to correct this situation? What can be done to make education not a tool of the powerful, but a means for individuals and societies to promote the fullest capabilities of what it is to be human? The powerful are not going to give up their power without a fight. The mases, having already mostly been indoctrinated and living in conformist roles, are very unlikely to start to think for themselves en-mass; and will discourage those whom might try inspire them to do so because they can’t be bothered to make the effort. Look at some of the great works by John Ralston-Saul and Noam Chomsky – people of wit and wisdom whom have had access to some of the most powerful people in the world (i.e. met with US Presidents) at various times; and yet the world continues to progress ever more rapidly down a path of dehumanising people and confining their capacities to the ‘norms’.

The problem is easy to dscribe; but it seems to me that the solution is difficult to come up with. Michel Foucault spent a lifetime on trying to understand power, and the results have been negligible; and Foucault is one of the most intelligent authors I have ever read and tried to conprehend. Why do people conform? Why are people willing to do what others tell them to do? What is it about living a fulfilling and expansive life that turns people away from it rather than trying to achieve it? I can’t believe that it is simply lazyness, nor a lack of desire; but there is obviously something significant because so few people ever achieve such an existence in the whole of human history.

The current human predicament is precariously paradoxical. We live in a mass culture obsessed with the need to know at a time of such instability and unpredictability that knowing is of little good. If there is a way out of this predicament—and there is—then people need to hear about it and take part in what is no less a conceptual revolution than the Scientific Revolution, which is what gave us the knowing paradigm in the first place.